The Future Is Upon Us: Failed Predictions, Boiling Frogs and Gun Printers by Paul T. Mitchell

Militaries are future-oriented institutions. They consider the impact of advancing technology, changing political dynamics, and the implications of global economic shifts. Yet as Nils Bohr reminds us, predictions are difficult, especially about the future. Very often, our predictions say more about our present: as Yogi Berra says, the future ain’t what it used to be.

At the present moment, the Canadian Forces is rewriting its Future Security Environment document, a publication which sits at the base of its whole capability development process. In the United States, the recently announced “Asia Pivot” drives military strategies like the Joint Operational Access Concept and the so-called Air Sea Battle. All of these consider the implications that the growth of Asian powers, in particular China, will have for strategic relations on a global scale.

At the Canadian Forces College, the Majors on the Joint Command and Staff Programme have just finished an exercise called Global Powers which requires them to examine the shifts in power between the major states and emerging ones like the “BRICS” in the effort to understand the environment in which the Canadian Forces may be called to operate. The estimates the students produced were remarkably conservative in nature, none of which called for any major transformations in global relations (defined in terms of other powers replacing the role the US plays currently). In essence, this is not at all surprising. The track record of experts in predicting the future is decidedly poor, despite decades of intensive regional study, events like the collapse of the Soviet Union and 9/11 came as total surprises, so the students share plenty of company in expecting that the future will look more or less like the present.

Nevertheless, the future is a real problem for militaries. Get it wrong and you lose a war, or worse. Historically, this has not always been so. In the ancient world, the advance of technology was remarkably slow. Agricultural societies practiced a form of warfare that did not change over periods of millennia. The equipment of Egyptian forces during the Middle Kingdom did not dramatically differ from that of Alexander the Great or even later Roman legions.

Crassus defeated by the Parthians.

The technology employed by Dark Ages Vikings did not dramatically differ from that used by Henry V at Agincourt. The combination of light infantry, heavy infantry, light cavalry, and heavy cavalry were present in varying amounts in all armies such that tactical affairs were essentially a game of rock-paper-scissors, and strategy was about looking at what had been done in the past to figure out what should be done in the future.

Industrialism changed all of that, however. The introduction of firearms began a period of technological development, fueled by the growth of both capital markets and the concentration of power in states. As the historian Charles Tilley remarked of this dramatic shift: “War made the State and the State made War”. Scientific methods of management, anticipating the ergonomic studies of Frederick Taylor and the industrial production line, emerged to guide the employment of the new military formations and the science of geometry was employed to create new fortifications taking advantage of firearms and even the movement of forces to and from the battlefield. Science, rather than history became the feature animating military power. Militaries that did not pay attention to how war was affected by technological and political developments could get caught by surprise with striking results. Perhaps the best recent example of this was during the Battle of France when French and British armies were surprised by the different ways the Wehrmacht employed armour, aircraft and wireless radio technologies.

The classic characteristic of what is commonly known as “blitzkrieg” is a highly mobile form of infantry and armour working in combined arms teams. (German armed forces, June 1943)

The trouble with most attempts to predict the future is that it is essentially unknowable. The future is the contingent outcome of a multiplicity of decisions and actions by innumerable actors and events. Looking back, there seems to be a story, what we call history, which suggests an inevitability to how events ultimately turn out. But this is a logical fallacy: looking at diaries, journals, and interviews of those in the past, there is always a sense that people have little idea of the ultimate significance of the events taking place all about them. Yet most predictions are often extrapolations of what presently exist. This sort of methodology leads to estimates of flying cars and space colonies, and fails to detect the Arab Spring.

If the industrialised age was one of rationalized control and ordered process into which the individual had to conform, the information age may be one of socially designed movements to fit your own specific lifestyle fashion and those who agree with you (and to hell with the rest). Rather than the “levee en masse”, we may have the levée sélective. That would be a real revolution in military affairs, staring at us in the face, but completely unobserved engrossed as we are with the latest in Tablet computing.

Dr. Paul T. Mitchell is a Professor of Defence Studies at the Canadian Forces College, an alumnus of Wilfrid Laurier University, and a Research Associate of the Laurier Centre for Military Strategic and Disarmament Studies. The views expressed here are those of the author alone and do not represent those of the Canadian Forces College or the Department of National Defence.

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